


the rosary, her lips and tongue

by siddals



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Inexperienced Kids Fooling Around, Sexual Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:11:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siddals/pseuds/siddals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During his recovery, Cosette and Marius experiment and become closer. <i>She would like to tell him that she will keep him alive, that the barricade is gone, that she will pull him to earth, but she holds back, doesn’t want to dispel whatever tentative thing they’ve made here.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the rosary, her lips and tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle XIV, with the prompts experimentation, pleasure and recovery.

Cosette comes to visit him every day.

At first, she does it more out of a sense of duty than any real benefit to him that she can imagine. The doctor comes and goes in the mornings and Marius’ grandfather never watches them particularly closely, content to lock himself in one of the rooms downstairs, so in the afternoons she sits alone with him in his bedroom. Marius is still fevered and does little but shout incomprehensible words in his sleep that might be names or might mean nothing at all. She comes all the same; Cosette considers her presence at Marius’ bedside to be a matter of unshakable obligation rather than calculated effect. If he stayed this way forever, she thinks, she will come, for at least an hour a day, and sit besides his bed. At this point, she’s promised no less. 

One day (luckily, when his grandfather is not in the room), he reaches for her. His arms are too weak to hold her but his hands wander over her hips, her waist, eagerly, clumsily reaching for her breasts. His hands are hot, burning, as they grasp at her, pulling at the fabric of her dress—he doesn’t try to restrain her as she steps away, seems to barely even know what he is doing and he moans out words underneath his breath, a few things she cannot make out and then something that sounds like her name. _Cosette, Cosette._ He is too ill to have put thought into it, Cosette thinks. He had only kissed in her in their garden, chastely, carefully, and she thinks of his hands wandering over her body and wonders if that had been what he had wanted the whole time, if it had all been a mask for this (had she been masking it too, in the way she offered him her hand, her lips, serene, unwanting?). 

It doesn’t happen again. After that point, he seems to hardly know she is there at all.

When his fever breaks, Cosette finds him sitting up in bed. He looks very small, frailer than she’s ever seen him but he smiles when he sees her and she kisses him lightly on the cheek, his skin still a little too warm. He seems glad to have her there but distant, at a slight remove that she doesn’t think can be intentional. He seems barely aware of her presence, as though she is a shade in the room competing with too many others.

Some days are better than others, some days he stands up and walks about the house with her, gripping her arm to stand and they talk about the sort of things they did before. She shares the latest news with him from outside, tells him stories she thinks will amuse him. They do not speak of the barricade or his friends. Other times, he seems withdrawn and irritable, barely speaks to her. He is never exactly unkind but Cosette feels her presence unwanted sometimes, or merely unnoticed, in his sickroom.

All the same, she comes every day.

It is a day in spring when she arrives at the Gillenormand residence and is informed by the maid that Monsieur Gillenormand is in town making calls. She is comfortable with the house by now, thinks of it almost as her own. If the servants think badly of her for spending as much time as she does alone in a young man’s bedroom, Cosette never thinks twice about it. She enters his room and is pleased to see Marius sitting up in his armchair with a book, looking positively animated compared to how he’s been over the past week. His face breaks into a smile when he sees her and she kisses him lightly on the mouth. She is usually the one to kiss him first, since the barricade and he the one to break away but today, she leans in further, cups his face with her hand, draws it out longer.

She’s not quite sure why she does it. It is spring and the day is warm, she supposes and the people on the street smiled at her as she walked this morning and she feels dizzy with it, a little drunk, a way she hasn’t felt for months now, not since the barricade.

Marius almost reciprocates for a moment but moves away before she does, seeming almost embarrassed.

“Cosette.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no,” he says, “of course you didn’t. It’s only—”

“Once in one of your fevers,” Cosette says, carefully, “you reached for me. Grasped at me.”

Marius flushes red.

“Cosette, I—I was not in my right mind. I would never, if I was myself—”

“So you don’t want those sort of things? In your right mind?”

“No, of course not!” Marius insists, his face still red.

Cosette’s eyes drop to her lap.

“Oh.”

“I mean,” he begins, “one day we’ll be married. I hold you above myself, Cosette, I would never want to do anything to stain you or frighten you or—”

“I wasn’t frightened,” she says, and draws his hand in hers. It feels very cold in comparison to the memory (he seemed a different creature that day, someone entirely other than the nervous, polite gentleman who had come into her garden, an odd gesture, she thinks, for someone as withdrawn in his affections as Marius is).

She kisses him, then, knits her fingers into his hair and climbs into his lap, her legs straddling his waist. When she draws away, his face is a furious shade of red. He seems almost confused and she almost wants to laugh, fondly, at his mussed hair and burning face.

“Cosette, I—I would never wish to take advantage, not before—”

“Shhh,” she says, and kisses him again, “It’s all right.”

He returns the kiss a little more this time, leans into her, his hands gripping her waist. She laughs a little as they break away this time, the sound breaking loose from her throat. This is the closest they have ever been, she thinks, they are together and Marius will live and he is not a distant figure, not a shadow at the edge of her garden but something she can hold and touch and feel.

He looks puzzled at the laugh, slightly wounded, as though he thinks she’s mocking him.

“I’m sorry,” she says, a little breathless, “it’s not you, I’m not laughing at you, I promise.”

She brushes a bit of hair off his face, places a lighter kiss on his forehead. He shifts a little underneath her, clearly uncomfortable and for a moment she doesn’t realize what it is exactly that’s troubling him, thought she’d finally managed to catch him off guard. She feels it, then, underneath her and draws back to look at him, her eyebrow raised.

“Cosette, I’m terribly sorry.” He looks miserable, mortified, as though he’s committed a terrible crime in front of her.

“What are you sorry for?” She lays another soft kiss on his lips and reaches down to touch, feels the length of him sticking up through his trousers. She doesn’t know much about men’s bodies, only what she managed to learn from books, little enough that she doesn’t quite know what to do with him now.

The nuns told her that women and men do things with one another, though never quite what, told her that men were hungry, tricksters, liars, that they must be kept away. She is hungry, she thinks and perhaps Marius is too, even if he buries it under distance and worship. He’s hardly like the men she was warned about, even if he did steal into her garden. Those men were grasping, wanting and Marius seems often to want nothing more than to kiss her hand or sometimes her mouth, holds her away from him as though she is something too pure for him to touch. There’s something satisfying about having him here, now, knowing there is some of that thief in him, even if he barely understands it.

She unbuttons his trousers, fumbling a little at the fabric and then runs her hand over the length of him. He lets out a groan and it’s low, like nothing she’s heard from him before.

“What should I do?” she asks, “Show me.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“I want to.”

He hesitates for a moment and then takes her hand in his, shows her how to move it up and down the length of him. She catches on after a moment, enough that he takes his hand away and she continues to move hers up and down, feeling a certain satisfaction at how he pants underneath her, how different he is from the polite young man in her garden.

She was warned about what comes of men lying with women, told about the bastard children on the streets, the women who became destitute and wretched (she wonders if this is how she was made, in an afternoon like this). He wouldn’t leave her starving, she knows that, but it will be months before he is well enough to marry her, too long to risk them making a child together now. This is enough, she thinks, they can learn each in the meantime, it’s much more than they’ve ever done before.

He comes with a shudder and goes soft in her palm; her hand is wet, sticky, as are his trousers and a bit of her dress.

“Your dress. I’m terribly sorry.”

She laughs.

“This wasn’t a very good dress in any case, and I’ll wear my shawl over any areas that might cause question. You can buy me a new one once we’re married.”

“Are you sure?”

“Perhaps all this was a plot to get a better dress from you. Didn’t think of that, did you?”

He grins, biting down on his lower lip and she’s struck with affection for him, a different kind than when she’d seen him in the Luxembourg or even in her own garden, something more familiar.

“May I?” he asks, a little nervous, his hands moving from her waist to lower down, around her hips. He’s clumsy, uncertain and it takes her a moment to figure out what he’s even attempting to do before she takes his hand in hers and guides it between her legs. He fumbles, seems utterly lost, and she clasps his hand, brings his fingers to the places where she’s touched herself, traces circles around the right spot with her finger. He’s careful, tentative, copies her motions exactly and Cosette’s breath hitches in her throat. He’s more confident after a moment, less restrained and his fingers work at her, still a little clumsy but learning. Cosette places kisses on his neck, his jaw, the side of his face. That he is here with her at all seems a wonder, she wants to discover every bit of him, keep him so close to earth that he can’t leave her again in mind or body. She lets out a whine, high and breathless, the sound escaping before she realizes it. He seems pleased with himself, grins at her, biting down on his lower lip.

“If you could,” she says, a little reluctant, “if you could press a little harder—”

He loses a sense of what to do with the new instruction, his fingers still for a moment and she takes his hand again, shows him where to press and stroke. She’s learned her own body over the years, taught herself the right things to do, made a ritual of it. She had thought for years that was all she would ever do, that her father would keep her with him until she was too old to marry, that nobody would ever touch her.

He doesn’t know her body as well as she does, of course but it’s different having him here all the same, not like when she traced these places with her own hand and thought that was the sum of it. She kisses him, pushes her tongue into his mouth and presses her hands into his shoulders, imagining herself anchoring him. He is hers now, only hers, he won’t be taken by bullets or ghosts, he will marry her and sleep in her bed and fit his body to hers. They will be happy, she knows it, makes a silent promise of it.

She comes more quickly than she usually does alone. Her body feels loose after she finishes, heavy, as though she’s been holding tension all this time and suddenly it’s gone. She kisses his mouth again, laughing.

“That wasn’t so terrible, was it?” she giggles.

“No,” he says, with a smile, “No, I guess not.”

“I’m half-afraid your grandfather will come in and find me like this. I don’t think it’d be much of a sight for him.” She lays a kiss on his jaw, grinning.

Marius looks horrified.

“He said he wouldn’t come back until the evening. He wouldn’t—come early, would he?”

She laughs.

“You’re so serious sometimes. I don’t know what to do with you at all.”

He draws her hands in his, bringing his mouth down to kiss them.

“I don’t want to go to my father’s house,” she says, “I wish I could stay here, sleep next to you. I don’t want to be away from you.”

“I wish you could,” he says, almost pleading, and she thinks it’s the first time since the barricade he’s said in words that he wanted her with him. She makes a note of it, holds it away, thinks that it is something she will remember the next time he seems to hardly see her, something she will keep.

She would like to tell him that she will keep him alive, that the barricade is gone, that she will pull him to earth, but she holds back, doesn’t want to dispel whatever tentative thing they’ve made here. His eyes are wide, childish, lost, so she brings her lips to her forehead and says she loves him in a way that’s become a refrain.

There are a few more hours at least.


End file.
